May Carol

This is my sister May, dancing with her husband in 1972.  May passed away last night at the age of 78 after a very brief illness.

May was born with every mental problem you can imagine and she has spent all of her years struggling to fit into this world.  May was intellectually slow, and my mother was always there for her as she taught her the basics of reading and writing and helped her get to high school.  She never finished but she got pretty far. It was the cruelty of other students that forced her to quit.  My mother found programs for the disabled for her, and closed workshops where she learned work-related skills. I remember driving with my mom long distances to take May to places where she could work. I remember friends of hers coming to the house who had physical disabilities that I'd never seen. 

There was a special program in the federal government that employed people with disabilities and my mom got May in.  She held an entry level job for 30 years, and except for a few incidents where she needed to be taken to the psych ward, she held her job and retired with benefits and a nice pension.

When May was in her 20's, my mom put an ad in the Jewish Press, a local paper, looking for a husband for May.  Joel, pictured above, wrote and said he was very short and very homely, but he was a good person with a good sense of humor and would she give him a chance? May did, and they hit it off immediately. They married in 1970 and remained together for 29 years, when he passed away.

When my parents became too frail to live in Florida, we brought them out here to Seattle and brought May as well, since without Joel she was on her own in New York.

At first May did a few volunteer jobs, and really enjoyed living out here. But by the time my parents were gone, she was really getting more mentally ill, and physically ill and it became my job to take care of her needs.  Fortunately in the last few years of her life she was living in an adult family home that she liked and where they took great care of her.  

Her sudden death this week has left me sad.  Sad for the hard life she had, and for all of her troubles.  She drove me crazy and there were too many times we had to take her to the hospital because she was wild. I expected to feel a relief when she left, but I don't.  I feel sad and I can hear her voice on the phone saying "Hi Lex, how ARE YOU? 

I hope she will have ease and comfort now, and Paul McCartney (who she loved more than life itself) in her heart.